Wireless communication systems provide for radio communication links to be arranged within the system between a plurality of user terminals. Such user terminals may be mobile and may be known as ‘mobile stations’ or ‘subscriber units.’ At least one other terminal, e.g. used in conjunction with subscriber units, may be a fixed terminal, e.g. a base station, repeater, access point, and/or eNodeB. Such a system typically includes a system infrastructure which generally includes a network of various fixed terminals, which are in direct radio communication with the subscriber units. Each of the fixed terminals operating in the system may have one or more transceivers which may, for example, serve subscriber units in a given local region or area, known as a ‘cell’ or ‘site’, by radio frequency (RF) communication. The subscriber units that are in direct communication with a particular fixed terminal are said to be served by the fixed terminal. In one example, all radio communications to and from each subscriber unit within the system are made via respective serving fixed terminals. Sites of neighboring fixed terminals in a wireless communication system may be offset from one another or may be non-overlapping or partially or fully overlapping.
Wireless communication systems may operate according to an industry standard land mobile radio (LMR) protocol such as, for example, the Project 25 (P25) standard defined by the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials International (APCO), or other radio protocols, the TETRA standard defined by the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI), the Digital Private Mobile Radio (dPMR) standard also defined by the ETSI, or the Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) standard also defined by the ETSI. Broadband wireless communication systems generally providing higher bandwidths for data, video, audio, and/or voice may also operate, alongside or in place of the LMR protocols, according to an industry standard protocol such as, for example, an open media alliance (OMA) push to talk (PTT) over cellular (OMA-PoC) standard, a voice over IP (VoIP) standard, or a PTT over IP (PoIP) standard. Protocols such as PoC, VoIP, and PoIP are implemented over broadband RANs including third generation and fourth generation networks such as third generation partnership project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks.
Communications in accordance with any one or more of these standards, or other standards, may take place over physical channels in accordance with one or more of a TDMA (time division multiple access), FDMA (frequency divisional multiple access), or CDMA (code division multiple access) protocol. Subscriber units in wireless communication systems such as those set forth above send user communicated speech and data, herein referred to collectively as ‘traffic information’, in accordance with the designated protocol.
Many so-called “public safety” wireless communication systems provide for group-based radio communications amongst a plurality of subscriber units such that one member of a designated group can transmit once and have that transmission received by all other members of the group substantially simultaneously. Groups are conventionally assigned based on function. For example, all members of a particular local police force may be assigned to a same group so that all members of the particular local police force can stay in contact with one another while avoiding the random transmissions of subscriber units users outside of the local police force. Public safety group-based radio communications generally demand high availability, but are subject to unpredictable intermittent use by group members that is dictated by the random occurrence of emergency incidents that do not occur at any pre-scheduled or predictable pattern.
However, situations may arise where upgrades, preventive maintenance, fault recovery, or some other operation (e.g., a service request) on the RAN requires some portion of the RAN to be taken out of service, including but not limited to a fixed terminal, a backhaul link, a device in the RAN core network, an application running on an application server, the application server itself, or some other transport link within a RAN core network. In conventional systems, such operations are generally scheduled during off-peak hours, and the existence of any currently active incidents perhaps manually confirmed via voice transmission with a dispatch center before the operations are executed and RF communications services potentially interrupted or degraded.
However, with the continued move towards high-bandwidth and high density broadband RAN communications systems, it is getting more difficult to determine what radio sites will be impacted by any particular service operation, and more difficult still to determine what subscriber units will be impacted and whether any of those subscriber units are involved in an incident response and would be negatively affected by the service operation during a critical time. Furthermore, manual verification of incident activity is prone to error and requires verbal dissemination of information across one or more organizations that is not always possible to maintain in a consistent manner under varying circumstances and across varying personnel. Accordingly, what is needed is an improved system, device, and method for handling service requests for performing service operation requests on RAN communications systems.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present disclosure.